The burlesque dance is an art form and then some!

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Monthly Archives: October 2014

THE BURLESQUE BULLSHIT DETECTIVE
(How Mass marketing makes us all feel like shit)

Take a look at any Burlesque dancer’s body. It is far from perfect. The neo burlesque dancer celebrates womanhood and femininity, not the ideal physique. Modern day Burlesque is about enjoying the female form in all forms. The burlesque body is not about achieving perfection. It’s already perfect with all of it’s imperfections. The burlesque art form is about dancing as if the body is already seductive weather the dancer is a size 8 or a size 14. But if you are like most women you have learned to find your own body full of deficits. It isn’t the perfect size 2 then forget about a man falling for you. You aren’t good enough. Or so society and TV shows imply all the time. In magazines, a beautiful model is with a beautiful man and the ad tells us that because she is wearing a certain perfume she has successfully won his affection. To add to this myth, all the male movie stars and every sports star out there seem to be with a gorgeous model or a woman able to pull off looking like one. If your body doesn’t look like one of them, than you probably feel undesirable, unattractive. UN everything. We learn to see that every imperfection in our body is one more feature that makes us UN-loveable to anyone decent. The “ugly” women of the world will just have to content themselves with a fat, bald, wife beating asshole because that is the best we’re going to get unless we can be more beautiful on the outside.
The mainstream media will sell you images of a model wearing a skin tight dress seducing the perfect man if she wears the right make-up or the right clothes or shoes. Let’s get this strait. The gorgeous perfect looking guy in that commercial is probably gay, so no matter how good you look, you’re not going to be end up with that guy. The guy in the perfume ad is going to end up with another guy. But commercials use this technique to sell their products. Guess what? It works. We all believe it. In fact commercials have three ways to manipulate us into buying what they are selling. They scare us, they seduce us, or they humor us. It has been done successfully for years and advertisers know it. The best technique is to scare us. Commercials imply that we won’t be able to keep our man if we don’t use this particular deodorant. The commercial might imply we’re not an attractive wife to our husband unless we eat this low fat cereal to help us loose weight. It’s time to call this for what it is:BULLSHIT! All a commercial will do is scare or seduce a woman into being a better consumer. Buying products won’t make anyone more desirable or more attractive. Nor will these products help us attain our goals. We all want to fit in and be loved by our family and surrounding community. But at some point we all get manipulated into believing that if only we buy products to make us better looking, will we attain these goals. And the message doesn’t just stop with magazine ads or television commercials.
We constantly see film and sports stars with their arm around the swim suit model on the red carpet. Yep. There they are marching around with twenty-something arm candy-it-girl- flavor of the month. We take in those images and feel like shit about ourselves. We also get sold the whole beauty myth notion. If said sport star or popular movie star only wants to be with that kind of a woman and would never be seen in public by anyone over the age of thirty, than it must be our fault that we let ourselves turn 31. But there he is in an interview after interview with the gorgeous woman right next to him. He must be right and we’re all just not good enough. But here is an insight not always considered by many of us: if he is only into model types he probably has a superficial view of beauty. The modern day burlesque dancer does not allow for that limited view of what is beautiful and sensual. A burlesque dancer dances with the knowledge that sensuality is in the spirit and energy of her movements and attitude about herself. She isn’t wearing a designer dress to make herself more alluring she is dancing as if she is ALREADY alluring and beautiful. Still we’ll believe the superficial views of the sports star or the movie actor over our the real truth. Those guys are successful at what they do so they must be have the right idea. Right? Maybe not.
What really makes people attractive is not the products they buy, but rather his or her life force, energy, talent, humor and intelligence. The neo burlesque dancer is proud of her body and shows it off. The truth is sexy in the neo burlesque world is not defined by any number. This means on a scale or in birthdays. Nor does sexy have an age cut off point in the neo burlesque world. But television and movies will not allow us to believe or relate to that concept at all. That idea doesn’t make money. So the media relentlessly hammers away at us on a daily basis. We end up making judgments of ourselves every day based on a viscous lie. We are trapped by this lie and we hate ourselves despite it being a lie. Women are especially vulnerable and so we keep buying cosmetics and clothes and diet plans hoping to make ourselves more attractive and younger looking. We keep buying. but we do so little work on ourselves on the inside. The truth is skinny does not really always equal sexy. It might make a woman more desirable by a film maker or advertising commercial, but it really doesn’t mean that woman has any real sex appeal in real life. Still we can’t help but get caught up in the terrible lie that only skinny women get the sports stars. It really isn’t our fault we believe this lie. Most of us grew up watching television, and we’ve been manipulated since childhood to believe that what we buy or what we eat or don’t eat will make a difference in our lives and will have the potential to make us more desirable people. It’s to bad we keep believing the lies as adults. It’s too bad a magazine add can’t have a warning label like a surgeon general’s on a carton of cigarettes that says: “This advertisement is bullshit and you shouldn’t believe a word of what you read or an image that is displayed.” It would also be nice if an announcer’s voice could be heard right before the commercial ends warning of us of the dangers to our personal moral if we continue to watch and believe the advertisement. What we all need is our own bullshit detective built into our personal hard drive. Until that day, we have two choices. We can keep believing the stupid deceptions we are inundated with over and over again, or we can all scream BULLSHIT at every advertisement on television and in magazines. A better idea might be to stop buying the products they are pitching at us. We can stop buying clothes that are advertised featuring a model like Kate Moss in it. It might not hurt to hurl some of our own advice at the Victoria Secret Model we see on television with her overactive thyroid to eat some cheese and fuck off! She’ll have a 31st birthday herself one day.